


Making Peace: Variations on a Theme

by arboretum



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 06:46:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17075378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboretum/pseuds/arboretum
Summary: It shouldn't be this hard to make peace with yourself.---Comic, & cut content.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I rewrote many scenes of this comic five, six, eleven times, and ultimately cut 99% of the content, failed to finish my drawings properly, and nearly missed my deadline.
> 
> Here's a collection of some of the stuff that didn't make it, as well as a link to the final iteration.

First things first, the comic.

 

* * *

 

 

 

[ ](http://makingpeacecomic.tumblr.com/post/181072513683/making-peace-it-shouldnt-be-this-hard-to-make%22)

####  [MAKING PEACE](http://makingpeacecomic.tumblr.com/post/181072513683/making-peace-it-shouldnt-be-this-hard-to-make%22)

 

 

Please click through. If tumblr really does die, I'll figure out some other way to host it, but bc of the (long horizontal) format this is a really tough one to put online anywhere in any form LOL.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

So, now that you've read it.

From the beginning, I envisioned the comic as a series of vignettes moving through the decades, beginning with Kaz's childhood, moving on through the end of MGSV, and I knew also from the beginning that what I wanted to explore were the parallels between Kaz and his mother, Kaz and Strangelove, Big Boss and the Boss, the inescapable gravitational pull that these final two had on the people who loved them. Because we're in Kaz's point of view, these ideas are infuriating.

I wound up rewriting several of these sections so many times I make myself dizzy just trying to look at my own text documents, but here's the bulk of it, I hope, organized by section. Please consider these to be… outtakes, and also, variations on a theme.

Although I didn't title the chapters in the final product, I toyed with the idea for a long time. Ultimately the only chapter that had no rewrites was chapter 2, the one about his mother.


	2. (1) snake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some of these are visibly unfinished, that's, uh, literally. how. it goes. sometimes. with me. this was the least important page tbh.

* * *

**1A. war games**

It started as a game, teasing, like so many things Kaz did. There was something invulnerable about Snake that he liked, and it gave him a strange pleasure to push him and watch him bounce right back, unaffected, pure. Like a magic trick; inexplicable and against all odds.

Send him into the field with a banana, and he’d come back victorious; it was like the rules of nature themselves bent to let him pass.

It didn’t occur to him that he could push too hard,

 

* * *

 

**1B.**

If you asked him, he couldn’t put his finger on why. He was free enough with anyone else who took his fancy. Nevertheless, it occurred to Kaz on multiple occasions that sleeping with Snake would be a bad idea. For him, for his career (what career?), for his mental and emotional well-being (it was trial enough dealing with Big Boss's legendary illogic when you weren’t sleeping with him) — he wasn’t sure. But it seemed like a bad idea. Messy, somehow.

Still, Snake presenting himself late that afternoon alone in Kaz’s room — _for a debriefing_ , some slightly hysterical part of Kaz’s mind wanted to point out — shirtless and his muddy pants halfway shucked as he muttered under his breath about cardboard boxes, well. Kaz was only human, after all.


	3. (3) strangelove

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I needed them to talk. It was almost the entire point of this comic for me, first to have Kaz and Strangelove talk, and then, later, to have Kaz and the Boss (the AI pod) talk.
> 
> This section had the most rewrites, because I wanted so badly for them to interact, and I didn't know how to put all of it into the 2 pages I'd allotted for it or how to make it relevant. In the end, obviously, I just didn't.

* * *

 

**3A.**

“So you’re happy with how your life has turned out? Playing house with a bunch of mercenaries off the coast of Costa Rica?”

At that, she cracked a small smile.

“I’m happy with the decisions I have made.”

 

 

* * *

 

**3B.**

She can tell he doesn’t know what to make of her, doesn’t quite know how to interact with women who repudiate his natural charm, but in this menagerie of idiots, she appreciates his company more than most.

She likes watching him cook; it reminds her of her mother.

“Hey, so, not casting any stones here or anything, but I’ve been wondering for a while — whatever possessed you to make that thing, anyway? A hell of a lot of trouble you put us through, you know?”

She looks up at him sharply.

“I mean… was she really all that?”

“You didn’t know her.”

 

/

[unpacking lunch]

_The Boss looks over her shoulder and tells her about Cape Canaveral. The air is sweet and humid in Florida, she can’t get used to it._

_How hot is it, Strangelove wants to know._

_As hot as this, worse maybe._

_The sun in California is blinding; she of all people was never meant to live in a place like this. Do you ever think we were born into the wrong time and place? That we were meant for something else or somewhere else?_

_I don’t believe in worrying about the what if’s. We take what we can get from this life._

_It’s true, if I weren’t here, I would never have met you._

/

 

“You always leave his to last.”

“Well,” Kaz says, his lips twisting humorously, “Someone on base likes his meat raw, and it’s my duty as XO to at least try to keep him from dying ignominiously from food poisoning.”

“Not,” he adds after a moment, “That I think he actually can get food poisoning.”

Strangelove looks at the lunchbox and doesn’t say anything.

When she looks up she finds Kaz is looking at her, and when she meets his eyes, he looks away.

 

 

* * *

 

**3C.**

From a distance, when he saw her back curved over a desk as she worked alone into the night, he always thought she looked sad.

 

 

* * *

 

**3D. don’t let this happen to you**

She was in the kitchen when he got there, and he raised an eyebrow at her in surprise.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she said. “I’m not here to cook.”

He raised his hands disarmingly, and she added in explanation, “I often find it enlightening watching masters of their craft at work, and I begrudgingly have to admit, you’re quite good.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty begrudging all right,” he agreed. He rolled up his sleeves and unhooked his apron from the wall. “But I’m glad you’ve been liking the food. So. Any requests?”

“None,” she said firmly. “This is purely observation.”

 

She watched for a while in silence. It felt awkward at first, then he really began to forget she was even there. That was when she began to speak.

“You wonder if you can trust me, after what I did.”

He glanced up at her.

“I don’t think you intend to betray us, no,” he said.

“I don’t have any regrets.”

[a wry smile] “Ha.”

 

 

* * *

 

**3E.**

“You often come to the mess hall on your own, I’ve noticed.”

“Been watching me much, doctor?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Does he enjoy these meals you make for him?”

[Kaz looks at her sharply.]

“Touched a nerve, I see,” she said. “Don’t worry, Commander. Your secret is safe with me.”

 

 

* * *

 

**3F. it chooses you**

“I don’t want you to get any ideas,” she said, before he could open his mouth. “I’m not here to cook, only to observe.”

After an abortive attempt to make fun on her first day by assigning her to the kitchen, Kaz learned his lesson and stopped joking with the doctor. She wouldn’t take shit from anyone, and after a period away spent nursing his wounded ego, he found he sort of admired that.

When she started to slink in on her free hours to watch him cook, claiming (he wasn’t sure if he should be offended) that he reminded her of her mother and that it relaxed her, he told her so once.

“I admire the way you do and say whatever the hell you want, doctor,” he said. “And that’s not a joke.”

She raised her eyebrows at him and made a sort of inscrutable noise, but he saw the smile before she repressed it, and took it as a victory.

“Tell me about… her,” he said once, to try to make conversation, and she did. She told him about her history, the things she had suffered, the sorrow she carried about her, as palpable as a shroud. She told him about how she first met her, a chance meeting. She’d rushed out after dusk into the hazy southern twilight for groceries, having put them off for too long again, and found herself face to face at the security kiosk with the most beautiful woman she’d ever met.

“Those eyes,” she mused. “You could tell in an instant that if she’d wanted you dead, you already would be. She had a backbone of steel.”

“And you found that hot,” Kaz suggested.

“Don’t be crude.”

(“So that’s a yes.”)

She had thought that that was the end of it; it didn’t occur to her that a woman with that kind of military bearing would be involved in her project, and she was surprised to see her again the next morning in her office. 

“That was how it began,” said Kaz.

“That was how it began,” she agreed.

Later, he questioned her about the AI.

“Was it worth it?” he asked.

She didn’t respond at first, but looked pensively into the middle distance. When she spoke, it wasn’t exactly an answer. “Do you think I’m insane?” she said.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m used to it. Everyone else thinks so.”

“I just,” Kaz said, trying to choose his words carefully, “Don’t know if I can ever understand what could possibly be worth… the pain.”

“Well, you don’t choose love,” she said simply. “It chooses you.”

 

 

* * *

 

**3G.**

When they recovered the nuke from the bottom of Lake Cocibolca, she was first at the door to see it wheeled into the hangar.

Later, he would pass by her office on the R&D platform and see her often staring into space or poring over maps of Nicaragua, clicking her pen rhythmically every few minutes, lost in thought.

“I just don’t understand that woman,” Huey said to him once, when Kaz passed by him in the hallway. “I mean, there’s something wrong with her, don’t you think?”

It didn’t seem tactful to point out that Huey was the one spending every free moment hovering outside her door, watching her.

“I mean,” Huey went on, “It’s one thing to be hung up over someone, but another woman? And then there’s the whole AI thing. I didn’t want to say anything, and I’ll admit the science is good, but didn’t you find that thing a bit creepy?

“You know,” said Kaz, “Love makes us do strange things sometimes.”

“It gives me the chills! And she’s still thinking about her now! I mean the woman has been dead for at least ten years, not to mention she herself hasn’t seen her for almost fifteen. To drag her out of her grave like that after all this time, it’s just disrespectful is that what that is.”

Through the doorway, Kaz could see her bent over her work, scribbling something in a notebook, oblivious to the two men watching her. Something about her put him in mind of a story he had heard once, early on, when he’d just set foot in America. A woman, spurned, who had slept at the side of her lover’s corpse for years and years before anyone ever found out.* At the time, it had reminded him of someone else.

He didn’t mention it to Huey.

 

 

* * *

 

**3H.**

Weeks later, standing in her lab discussing her budget with her, he found his eye catching on the maps again, and he couldn’t help but ask, “You still think about her a lot, huh?”

She took a moment to smooth down the crinkled edge of a document before answering. “I would challenge anyone who’d ever met her not to.”

Kaz thought about Snake and said, “I take your point. Still, not everyone goes to the lengths you did.”

“Bringing her back?”

“Was that really her?”

“You still have doubts?”

“I guess I never met her.”

“Indeed,” she said. “A man like you could never understand.”

“Maybe so…”

 

 

* * *

 

**3I. The difference**

“I would know the difference,” he said.

“Would you, though?”

He glanced at her sidelong, and then blew out a puff of smoke, balancing his cigar on three fingers. It wasn’t his vice of choice — he rather preferred wine — but he sort of liked them. If he had to tell the truth, they made him feel just a little bit cool.

“I’m not asking rhetorically, Commander,” she said. “I’m genuinely curious what you think would give it away. Take away the optics, pretend you’re in another room separated by a wall that allows sound but not light. You hear the voice of your loved one speaking to you, and she’s telling you things about herself that you never knew. Is it not her? Everything about her has been reconstructed. For all intents and purposes, it is her. She is here. You cannot tell the difference.”

He sat on that and digested it for a moment.

“That doesn’t seem creepy to you at all?”

She gave him a blank look.

“Well, all right, never mind then,” he said.

Afterwards, outside, he ran into Huey, who gave him a jealous, hungry look, and then burst into invective. “There’s something wrong with that woman!”

“You were listening?”

“Being hung up over someone for fifteen years —”

Kaz thought there was something wrong with both of them, to be honest, but he wasn’t about to piss off his two best R&D engineers by saying so.

Weeks later, he found himself in conversation with Strangelove, sitting at her lab bench listening to her expound on the virtues of the Boss, and he must have let it show on his face, because she stopped mid-sentence and said, “You’ve never been in love before, have you?”

He laughed at her. “Listening to you, doctor, I hope never to be so unfortunate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner. This is wrong, but I remembered it wrong before I looked it up, and if I could remember it wrong, Kaz could remember it wrong -- Kaz especially could remember this one wrong ;)


	4. (4) home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that moment.
> 
> I think for a while I wanted to have one spread about love (snake) and one about home (mother base) but they did seem to be hitting the same emotional note, so I ended up cutting the mother base stuff entirely.

* * *

**4A. home**

Did he ever think to imagine that this would be his life?He’s had his head down for so long trying to make it in this world that he’s not sure he’d know it anymore if he did.The idea that there could be a place in the world for him, a bastard child of war and prostitution, nationless and homeless —

Is this it?

He touches his fingers to the wall of the pool and knows the price of each tile, the color and cost of the grout. This is the home they’ve built; this is the home he’s built for himself. His hand has touched each beam they’ve erected, each platform they’ve constructed. It’s his, as much as anything has ever been his.

Off the horizon, a distant glint.His earpiece buzzes and he answers, “What’s up, Snake?”

 

 

* * *

 

**4B.**

When they told him the pool on the fitness platform had been completed, he quietly cleared his schedule for the rest of the afternoon and went out to give it an executive test run. It was a short drive over, but he liked the walk.

When he got to within a stone’s throw of the water, he toed off his shoes and walked the rest of the way barefoot, the blacktop pavement hot on the soles of his feet.

He’d had them place the pool on the west side, facing the sunset, and looking out over the edge of the platform now, he could see, blindingly, the fiery ball of the Caribbean sun melting slowly into an endlessly glittering sea. It was a pretty picture, if he did say so himself.

It wasn’t exactly the life he’d envisioned for himself as a child, yearning to escape Japan, grasping for a chance to prove himself. Management, Kaz? Really? And yet he found he was quite good at it.

He dipped his feet into the water, the tiles smooth and cool to the touch. He knew without even thinking about it how much each of them had cost, where the grout had been sourced from, the price and make and model of the pump that was circulating the water. There wasn’t a thing on this base he didn’t know everything about; his fingerprints were on every beam, every strut, every post.

It wasn’t in his nature to be satisfied, but trailing his fingers through the water as he sat at the edge of a pool he’d built from scratch with a company of men he’d rounded up from nothing on a base he’d sweet-talked out of thin air, it seemed to him that if he could be satisfied anywhere, it would be here.

 

 

* * *

 

**4C.**

It was a slow Sunday, the day that he realized. Sun low on the horizon, Snake coming back in after a mission — something fairly low-key for him, Kaz couldn’t even remember the details. The sea was like glass, the air still and wet and hot; it had been unusually rainy for December.

It was the smell more than anything that he remembered, the door opening and Snake emerging in a burst of rainforest, earthy and green. He’d brought Costa Rica back in the mud on his boots and the grass stains on his shirt, and the nape of his neck was damp with sweat, his hair and the collar of his shirt wilting in the humidity. When he stepped into the sunlight, he looked like some sort of savage god. But it wasn’t even that — it was the way he looked at Kaz looking at him, the tilt of his head, his expression quizzical, animal, indescribable.

The words Kaz had been about to say caught on the tip of his tongue.

“Haha,” Snake said brightly. “Cat got your tongue?”

It was the stupidest line Kaz had ever heard. He felt like he had been shot.

He had never wanted a thing like this, but when it came to him, he found he could not say no.

 

 

* * *

 

**4D.**

He’s rank and unwashed and there’s someone else’s blood on his shirt, but there’s no part of him Kaz doesn’t want.

He doesn’t touch him.

He smiles and says, Hey boss, you killed it out there.

Snake looks perturbed for a second, and then says, Oh, you mean metaphorically.

Kaz stares at him and thinks desperately, not for the first time, that there has to be something wrong with him, that there has to be something wrong with _Kaz_. Y-yeah, he agrees. You got it.


	5. (6) joy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> skipping over 5 entirely -- there were some rewrites there but nothing particularly interesting -- to 6, which (along with the Strangelove spread) formed the linchpin of my thesis: Kaz:BB::Strangelove:Boss.
> 
> not as fun when I write it out like that tho huh.
> 
> anyway, like with the Strangelove spread, a severe lack of allotted space (ONE PAGE LOL, I am a fool) made it really difficult to put this bit together. well, also, I couldn't decide which beats to hit in the Strangelove spread and which to hit here.
> 
> I think what I did in the end was just take only the dialogue from one version of this and use that alone?????? I guess it worked okayyy…… but I regret that I wasn't able to get everything in that I was trying to. anyway, a learning experience.

* * *

**6A.**

The AI Pod was a poor conversationalist, but a fine listener.He dug up all of Strangelove’s old tapes, played them one by one out loud sitting in front of the thing.The whole thing was self-aggrandizing, which Kaz supposed at this point was just his style.

 

 

* * *

 

**6B.**

The night was darker and wilder out at sea, the stars brighter, the blacks blacker.

Kaz had spent nine years landlocked before returning to the sea, and there was something darkly funny about it now, but his first few weeks on the new Mother Base had been some of the most disorienting of his life. Everything was right, but wrong. Home, but not. The tarmac, too fresh; the paint, too new. Even the stars were wrong: wrong latitude, wrong longitude. It took him some time to get re-accustomed.

He had taken walks every night, too worked up to sleep, waiting for the word from Ocelot, ready to dispatch at a moment’s notice.

Afterwards, when he’d regained the use of his leg, he’d resumed his nightly vigil. Insomnia was a fact of life for him now; he’d lived with it for a decade. Sometimes during the day he could hear the men whispering about him, calling him a specter, a wraith. _Did you see the ghost on patrol again? Rattling his chains again?_ they would ask each other, and laugh.

Well, if Kaz wanted to haunt the decks of Mother Base at night, it was his goddamn right.

His usual route took him down by the support platform, looping up and down the stairs until he wore himself out. It was still where he felt most at home. The medical platform he usually gave a skip entirely, except for one strange evening when he’d found himself there for hours, looking in on an empty cage and wondering why he even felt upset. He’d left when he’d noticed the Boss sitting quietly in the corner, a matching phantom to himself, shrouded in darkness and keeping a silent vigil. Had he been there the entire time? Had he slipped in while Kaz wasn’t paying attention? Either way, it pissed him off; he made a point to clank as violently as he could up the stairs on his way out, and heard, for his troubles, a heavy sigh from the shadows.

Tonight, though, he wanted the R&D platform.

It was a long walk, and the voices generally began about halfway down the connecting bridge. Sometimes, when she was particularly distraught, they would overlap, philosophy and gibberish layering over each other, an eerie soundscape.

Tonight she was silent. He sat in front of her for a long time not saying anything, just contemplating the bulk of her. It was a clear night and the stars were out, and he felt small and insignificant down in the hangar bay, lost in her shadow.

“It’s been some time since I last visited you,” he said at last.“I guess a lot has happened.”

The pod was quiet.

“I never told her this, but I always thought she was a bit loony for making you. I couldn’t decide if you were real or not, if she’d dragged you out of your grave or just fabricated you out of whole cloth. I couldn’t decide which of the two was more palatable, which more disturbing. It just seemed crazy. Everything about her seemed crazy. Just unfathomable. Like that woman in that story who slept with a corpse — you know the one.”

He paused and looked up at the sky.

“Who am I to talk, huh?

“You know, I was angry when they told me. I still am. But I think I knew. You knew too, didn’t you? But I didn’t want to think it was true. I mean, of all the —

“Since that day, I’ve been thinking about her a lot. Is that strange? I wonder what she was like when she was a young woman. Before she met you, I mean.

“I guess you wouldn’t know.”

He laughed.

“He takes after you in that way, I think.

“If I could take you both out in one shot I would,” he said. “It’s the least we deserve from you. But you — she wanted you to live, didn’t she? Even after everything, she wanted you to live.

“It’s unfathomable,” he said.“it’s just unfathomable.”

 

 

* * *

 

**6C.**

Ocelot had asked him, when they first found the body, what he wanted to do with it.He’d entertained the notion — however briefly — of rubbing Huey’s face in his own staggering pile of lies, but when the medical examiner had drawn back the sheet and he’d finally laid eyes on her again after nine long years, the vicious thrill that had been building in his heart died stillborn.

Forty-seven years old, the brightest mind of her generation.Reduced to this.A sudden spike of rage, and then, abruptly, nothing.It came and went like that sometimes.

In the end, he’d had her cremated.He quietly put the box of ashes back where they’d first found her.

It would do, for a grave.

Sentimental, he supposed.All the same.

Someone had to remember her.

 

 

* * *

 

**6D.**

He hadn’t had much interest in the AI Pod until then, but after that, he found that when insomnia had him pacing the decks late at night and into the morning, he’d often swing by just to stare at it — this strange monolithic gravestone to a woman he’d once known.

 

 

* * *

 

**6E.**

It never spoke to him, not like it did — he knew — to the Boss.He didn’t bother speaking to it, either.

 

 

* * *

 

**6F.**

“I was careful, you know?I thought I’d covered all my bases.I didn’t want to — I never asked for him, for this, for — whatever this is.I thought, I’ve already tried to kill us both once, and it didn’t take.I thought, I send him out into the field unarmed and naked, and he still comes back to me victorious every time — I don’t know what I thought.He was unbreakable, and so we were unbreakable.Did I think I was hitching my star to a god?

“I was a fool.You know this, don’t you?I was a fool, and so was she.Finding her body like that — you think she knew?You think she had any inkling when she met you that it would lead to this?She told me once you were the best thing that ever happened to her.”

He laughed.

“You know what I say to that?Fuck that.Fuck you both.”

 

 

* * *

 

**6G.**

“Well now it’s just you and me.”

“I wonder if you were worth it.”


End file.
